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Pete's swim blog

My Team
I swim on a small team (Madison Titans) with 4 regulars and a couple others that can't make the morning workout. On Saturdays and occasional weekdays, I drop by HSA in Huntsville for a swim in the big pool.

Swam w/ Dave, Dave, Ray, Meredith and Carlile. Long swimming weekend. Thursday was our district dive meet. Since my daughter dives in the under 10 category, it wasn't too bad. We were done early and headed home before the older divers did their 3 meter competition. Friday and Saturday was the district swim meet. This wasn't so bad. It was held 50 miles away in Guntersville, AL. I got in about 4500 yards in the morning and then headed off w/ the kids for warmups. My younger son had a decent meet. He started off as a backstroker but seems to be embracing his breaststroker genes finally. He was just a couple seconds off state qualifying times (for breaststroke) and still has a year left in his age group. The highlight of his meet was that I brought my laptop to do work. He talked me into letting him play Starcraft II on it all weekend. My daughter had a tough meet. She dq'd the breaststroke (dolphin kicked too many times off the dive) and regressed on freestyle. I don't worry about it too much though. She's a natural diver and has a strong dolphin kick. She's almost always the first one to 12.5 yards. Once she gets a stronger stroke, she is going to be very competitive. My older son had a great meet in a slow pool. He dropped lots of time and has gone from the guy who is always last to somewhat competitive. What's more, he seems to want to swim w/ me in the winter and can't wait for next year to start.

I tried to swim Saturday morning but the annual city meet was going on. Sunday I got away for a pick-up soccer match. Running didn't hurt nearly as bad as it did last week. Still need to watch my back pain a little though. Meredith joined us for an hour this morning and then did lifeguard duty. When my leg cramped up on the 400 IM kick, she did NOT jump in to rescue me. I had to one arm swim to the shallow end and save myself . Cramps were probably from dehydration and soccer last night.

Swam w/ Dave, Dave and Sam. Skipped yesterday. No good reason. I didn't sleep well and my alarm didn't go off but I could have made it about 20 min. late. Instead, I just went back to bed. Felt rested today. I wasn't particularly fast but I wasn't sore.

SCY

600 Warm up

6 x 50 - :45
50 Easy
800 Timed, Open turns @ 200s (2:27, 2:27, 2:28, 2:23)
50 Easy
Sam got in and warmed up during the 800. He cruised behind me for the first 2 200s. Then, on the last length of the third, he blew past me. I picked up the pace to try and follow. Didn't do a bad job but he still put distance on me.

Swam w/ Dave, Dave and Sam. Pretty wild weekend. The short of it is that we have 4 Latvian orphans living with us now. We kind of became a foster home after a badly devised "pre-adoption" didn't pan out very well. Cute kids but masters of the "I don't understand English" game in order to get away with stuff. The more I learn Russian, the more I find out they know more English than they are letting on. After 2 days, I'm pretty attached to them. It is going to be hard to let them go at the end of the month. But for now, they are in a much better situation. There are three more brothers/sisters still in Latvia. If anyone wants and instant family, I know where to find one!

Swam w/ Dave and Dave. Pool temp down to 80! I think this has a lot to do with exceptionally cool weather we are having. While the west is baking, little has been said about the cool and (as of yesterday) very wet summer the southeast is having. Not that things can't change in a few days and we have had some very hot Septembers. Anyways, we had a very wet 4th of July. A neighborhood rain gauge registered almost 7 inches. We normally get about 2 inches in the entire month of July. I don't think they turn on the heater during the summer so all this cool weather has kept pool temps down.

Swam w/ Dave and Dave. Did another workout that was left on the whiteboard. Blakely disavowed any connection to this workout. It is probably from the previous day's 13-14 year old workout. We modified intervals where needed and added a little on at the end.

Swam w/ Dave and Sam. Swam Saturday w/ Dave, Dave and Mary. I've been fighting a cold over the last couple days. It was better this morning but I felt really awful Saturday. Long course just wasn't be best thing for me Saturday.

Saturday workout:

LCM

500 Warm up
3 x 200 (100 kick/100 swim, 100 swim/100 kick, 200 kick)

4 x 50 IM Order
4 x 50 Free
3 x 100 IM Order down/free back
3 x 100 Free
2 x 200 IM
2 x 200 Free
Most of this was touch and go. I was trying my best just to keep up. I was able to keep closer to Dave on the Free but he was leaving me on the IM.

2 x 400 Pull (Made about 5:05 on these)

2 Rounds of:
* 4 x 100 drill down/swim back, IM Order
* 3 x 50 fast (Most of these were on :38-:40, made the last on :35)

Swam w/ Dave and Dave. My kids had a meet in Boaz, AL last night that ended at 9:30. It is about a 75 minute drive from my house so, we got back in at 11:00. I was kind of dragging at practice. It was worth it though. My daughter finally got "called up" from the development team and dropped 3 seconds off her 50 free time in a fairly slow pool. My oldest son dropped 2 seconds off his 50 free time and then shocked everyone by dropping another second off his 200 free relay split. That one second drop turned out to be significant since they won by .6 seconds. He's got some great teammates. Starting swimming competitively at age 15 when everyone has been swimming for a long time has to be intimidating. Instead of negative talk about how much faster they could be if someone else had showed up, they all told my son he could go fast enough for the team to win the race. It was fun to watch and worth being a little drowsy this morning.

Swam w/ Dave, Dave and Sam. I haven't gotten the post-taper improvement I was hoping for. I'm still a little tapered and swimming faster but I'm wearing out quickly. It's not quite like last taper even though I pretty much did everything the same.

200 IM Timed (3:0?) Had to abort when my calf and foot simultaneously cramped on the fly. Tried to swim it off but after 25 yards, it kept getting worse. Stretched out really quickly on the wall and then finished as strong as I could.

I'm not much of a sprinter but I seem to be getting better at it. Last weekend, I joined our local summer league team, Madison Dolphins, along with 6 other Masters swimmers to compete in the Alabama State Games. The facilities were awesome. Half the building was an indoor 50m pool with a diving well. The other half was an indoor track and field stadium. The competition lanes were all 7'+ deep and it was set up with 10 lanes (8 used) running to a bulkhead. 6 more lanes were set up on the other side of the diving area for warm-ups/cool down. Everything was state of the art. The pool was a tad warm but still fast. That might have had to do with what appeared to be an erratic climate control system. On deck, temps were 80-85. It was cooler in the stands but noticeably different from the 70 degree temps in the large connecting hallway.

My only minor complaint with the meet was that they divided us up into obscure age groups to fill out all of the lanes. In general, that may be OK, but I was more competitive with some of the 25-40 year olds than I was with the 50-70 year olds I got placed with. I'm not sure why they didn't just seed it by our seed times. There would have been a lot of better races if they had done that for the masters. I get why they do it for the age groupers. Maybe it was hard to convince the software to do it different ways.

Short story is that I'm the 2013 6 time Alabama State Champion in my age group. Sure, three of those were unopposed and I'm not sure who exactly recognizes such a title. But supposedly, it qualifies me for a trip to the National State Games in Hershey, PA (all expenses paid by me). My 15 yr old son qualified as well and is now bugging me to go since it is apparently located near an amusement park (all expenses paid by me of course). Unfortunately, this isn't likely to be in the cards this year. I'm back to piling up yards for a possible SCM meet in November.

I swam 6 events thinking this would take about 6-8 hours to go through. It took 4. My last two swims probably suffered a little because of this. Ok... it took 8 when you add in the awards ceremony. Masters got medals for places 1-3. Age groupers got medals for 1-3 and ribbons for 4-6. With 7 events total, this took a while. They probably could have cut a lot of that out if they just awarded a high point trophy for each age division for masters. The kids that stuck around for it had fun so I was patient.

Here's the event details:

200 Free
Seed Time: 2:02.71
Meet Time: 2:03.04
Splits: 29.07, 30.98, 31.74, 31.25
Yikes! What happened here? It looks like I faded at the end but this was mostly botched turns. Bulkheads get into my head for some reason and I kept jamming up on them. I was getting a little tired and I think I didn't warm up enough. Started to wonder if I had missed my taper.

50 Free
Seed Time: 26.98
Meet Time: 25.97
Splits: N/A
I was hoping for 25.5 ish but I'll take the improvement. Got beat down by Jay (former college swimmer that spent all of 4 weeks getting ready for this event) who did a low 23. At least from this race, I knew there wasn't a problem with my taper.

200 IM
Seed Time: 2:22.58
Meet Time: 2:21.75
Splits: 30.25, 41.81, 38.56, 31.13
My typical negative split IM. Here's my feb splits: 31.06, 40.87, 38.48, 32.17. So, I gained on the Fly and Free but lost a second on backstroke. Breaststroke was pretty much a wash. Jay was swimming next to me in this race which helped a lot. He went 29 on his fly and I tried to follow. When I turned for backstroke, I had trouble breathing so I slowed a bit to catch my breath. I assumed Jay was going to leave me but the damage wasn't too bad and I was still within striking distance when I came up for my first breaststroke breath. I caught him at 125 and tried to put as much distance on him as I could before the free assuming he would do what he just did to me on the 50 free race. Fortunately for me, 1) He wasn't a breaststroker, 2) 4 weeks of training wasn't enough to sustain his 100 pace and 3) I didn't know any of that. So, I put my head down and assumed he was on my heels for the rest of the race. Sometimes the imaginary guy chasing you down is worse than the real thing.

100 Breast
Seed Time: 1:10.77
Meet Time: 1:09.53
Splits: 33.03, 36.50
Hit the dive just right on this race. I couldn't believe how fast I was just gliding. I got in one solid dolphin kick + a pullout and popped up w/ good speed at 15 meters. What a ride! Finally broke 1:10 but my second 50 wasn't quite as nice as the first.

100 Fly
Seed Time: 1:10.00
Meet Time: 1:05.02
Splits: 30.45, 34.57
I tried to match my 200 IM fly speed for the first 50 (successful) and then hold on to my pace (no so successful). First 50 felt great. On the second 50, I could feel myself riding lower and lower into the water. I didn't crash too hard but a 4 second difference seems like a lot for me.

100 Free
Seed Time: 57.83
Meet Time: 56.89
Splits: 27.42, 29.47
Swam next to Jay again and he paid me back for the 200 IM. I "held on" for the first 50 but he was just too fast (I think he split faster than my 50 free time) on the way to a mid 53. It was fun to try anyway.

Looking forward to it next year. Jay ages up into my age bracket next year so "6 time champion" may be a little harder in 2014. Great job to Dave C (4 time Alabama state champion) who I swim w/ on most mornings and Brandon (5 time Alabama state champion) who I swim w/ on Saturdays. For three of our Masters, this was their first meet. One of those even swam the 200 IM! And finally, congrats to the Madison Dolphins who took their team 100 miles to outscore all of the local teams and win the large team first place trophy!

Swam yesterday w/ Dave C and my son. Dave took today off. Yesterday, I swam about 2000 yards. Started w/ some underwater sdks w/ fins followed by some hard kick to 15m and finally some hard swims to 15m. Lots of rest inbetween. At the end, I did a 100 br broken at the 50. Went 37.5/37.5 for a 1:15. Not too good. I should be doing :35's. Maybe I'll be better w/o the drag suit this weekend.

Today, I did a bit less yardage:

SCY

600 Warm up

8 x 50 - 1:30 Underwater sdk w/ fins down/easy back
50 Easy

6 x 50 - 1:30 2x(Fly/Br/Fr) sprint to 15m, cruise
50 Easy

100 Free broken @ 50 for :10s (:56 - :28/:28) Not completely sure about this. My son took the times and I think he was being generous with the clock. It was probably closer to :29s or :29.5s. I'll take it as a confidence builder though.

200 Free broken @ 50s - 2:02 (:30, :30, :31, :31)
In Feb, I did 2:01 w/o a drag suit and ended up at 2:02.5 for my meet time. My 2:02 today was with a drag suit and the third 50 was pretty awful. I think this is good but I'm not as positive about improvement as I am w/ the 200 IM.

Swam w/ Roger, Dave, Dave and Sam. More taper. Had a great broken 200 IM. Mostly tried to stay with the workout that everyone else did except I cut their distance in less than half and increased my speed. E.g. they did a bunch of 400s while I did a 25 and waited for them to pass me before I pushed off again. It wasn't ideal but it worked and I mostly stayed out of Sam's way.

Broken 200 IM - 2:22 (32.5, 39.5, 39, 31)
Close to my feb meet time of 2:22.5 (31, 41, 38.5, 32). Before the feb meet, I did a broken 200 IM during my taper and went 2:27. That was without a drag suit. Today, I wore my drag suit. I was really happy w/ how strong I was able to finish. That and I'm splitting the IM a lot more evenly now due to a stronger backstroke leg.

Swam w/ Dave next to Dave, Dave and Sam. Dave C and I are Tapering for the Alabama State games next Saturday so we went with a different workout. There aren't a lot of Master's meets close to us (within about 100 miles) and I wanted to do a mid-year taper. So, this was it. Here's what I'm swimming:

200 Free
50 Free
200 IM
100 Breaststroke
100 Fly
100 Free

Most of these I don't normally swim and I've never competed in the 100 fly. So, this is kind of a fun experimentation meet. As an extra bonus, I get to swim on my kid's Madison Dolphins team. I'm definitely looking forward to that part of the meet. We have 5 adults swimming on the team and 45 kids. It should be a lot of fun.